FRIB, East Lansing, USA
Development of many software projects at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) follows an agile development approach. An important part of this practice is to make new software versions available to users frequently to get feedback in a timely manner. Unfortunately building, testing, packaging, and deploying software can be a time consuming and error prone process. We will present the processes and tools we use at FRIB to standardize and automate this process. This includes use of a central code repository, a continuous integration server performing automatic builds and running automatic test, as well as automated software packaging. For each revision of the software in the code repository the continuous delivery pipeline automatically provides a software package that is ready to be released. The decision to deploy this new version of the software into our production environment is the only manual step remaining. The high degree of reproducibility as well as extensive automated tests allow us to release more frequently without jeopardizing the quality of our production systems.
